If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.
Interpretation
Desire and prolonged waiting can consume you, changing your identity and priorities.
This quote reflects on how intense longing and the anticipation for something over time can lead to an all-consuming focus on that desire. As one invests significant emotional energy into wanting something, it can overshadow other aspects of life and even transform one's identity and sense of self, suggesting that protracted desire may not always yield a positive outcome.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming obstacles, one can use this quote to discuss the dangers of becoming too fixated on a goal.
...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
So little time we live in Time,_x000D_ _x000D_ And we learn all so painfully,_x000D_ _x000D_ That we may spare this hour's term_x000D_ _x000D_ To practice for Eternity.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.
Que me voulez-vous?' said he in a growl of which the music was wholly confined to his chest and throat, for he kept his teeth clenched, and seemed registering to himself an inward vow that nothing earthly should wring from him a smile. My answer commenced uncompromisingly: - 'Monsieur,' I said, je veux l'impossible, des choses inouïes.
Knowledge is power...knowled ge is safety...knowle dge is happiness.
It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and therefore one seldom does it at all.
Who travels far will often see things Far removed from what was believed as Truth.
Abandon cleverness, discard profit, and thieves and robbers will disappear.
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